The Hollywood absurdity reaches new levels: the Writers Guild of America (WGA) is now facing a strike from its OWN staff union (WGSU) — a union inside a union! In early 2026, the WGA’s ~115 staffers walked out over unfair labor practices, surveillance claims, higher pay demands (from ~$43k min to ~$60k+), and strict NO-AI rules in their workplace... while the WGA itself fights studios for similar AI protections for writers.

Malcolm & Simone break down this hilarious/self-defeating “unions all the way down” situation, why unions (especially public-sector ones) often hurt the workers they claim to protect, how mandatory writer minimums and AI bans create slop and kill competitiveness, why modern writing feels AI-generated anyway (looking at you, recent Wednesday/Star Trek seasons), Stephen Colbert’s comedy decline, and the broader lesson: unions can turn industries unviable (hello, Detroit autos, Pan Am).

We also touch on AI making employees 10–100× more valuable (if they embrace it), why demanding raises without ROI thinking puts you first on the chopping block, and why Hollywood’s output feels disconnected from audience demand or profitability.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be talking about the ridiculousness of what’s going on in Hollywood right now, which will give us an odd, a chance to talk about many related issues specifically wag the Writer’s Guild of America.

Created a union under itself that is now in a fight with the Writer’s Guild of America that the Writer’s Guild of America is not stepping down from, and the fight is over all of the things that the Writer’s Guild of America is. At the moment fighting the studios for, so for example, the biggest issue that the Writer’s Guild of America will not compromise to with its own union of members is they want it to not be able to use AI to replace him.

That’s the core thing. It’s arguing with the studios about. And so we’re going, because I [00:01:00] first heard about this. And I was like, I have to understand this in so much more detail. Is this normal to have a union inside of a union? Is it normal for them to be fighting a union over the same things that union is fighting externally over?

What are they fighting over? What aren’t the union bosses compromising on? Why does the union inside the union say they’re being trailed by surveillance agents hired by the union?

Simone Collins: what?

Malcolm Collins: Yes.

Simone Collins: Unions with the spies.

Malcolm Collins: It is, it is. Unions all the way down, nothing but unions.

Malcolm Collins: Next I need to have a Union. Of the Union. Of the Union.

Simone Collins: yes. That That’s the secret Union. They just don’t tell you about that

Malcolm Collins: so I wanna talk about this fight. One because it’s comical, but [00:02:00] two, it provides us with two interesting things that we can look into and dig deeper on. One is the problem with unions more broadly.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I personally am not an anti-union person. I am anti-public sector union. I think that’s insane. But I think that unions should be legal.

However, I think that they are very rarely good for anyone. And unfortunately people are just.

Simone Collins: the employees. Let’s be clear.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they’re usually bad for employees. Right. And we’ll get into, and this will be a clear instance of just how little unions actually care about employees. And, and if you’re wondering why I’m so against things like public sector unions, the famous line from the head of like the teacher’s union in in New York was like, we’ll start caring about the best interest of students when students start paying union dues.

Which is true. And Simone found this really great study that was looking at how long school closures around COVID happened and. The number one thing that was correlary wasn’t the amount of outbreak in a region, but the strengths of the teacher’s [00:03:00] union.

Simone Collins: About safety?

Malcolm Collins: it was just about getting teachers time off at extra pay.

But I wanna go into how unions break down, how they make things worse for workers. So that’s one thing that we’re gonna talk about. And then we’re going to go into on, on top of that, we’re gonna go into how AI is changing the workplace environment and how. And why? Basically nobody’s making serious compromises on it.

Even the union that is fighting against AI is unwilling to allow its workers to say, we won’t use ai. It’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Come on. Be, be reasonable here. People.

Simone Collins: I thought you were gonna say that they were going complete Luddite in a way that was going to render them obsolete in the end. But what you’re saying is actually they’re fighting back and they’re saying, no, I actually kind of wanna use ai.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no. They’re being like, oh, well, I mean reasonably you can’t do any, and, and then I wanna talk about how.

Simone Collins: interesting ‘cause I’ve actually, a bunch of the, the, the woke YouTubers I write have been talking about how new iterations of shows feel like they’ve been written by [00:04:00] ai. And I wonder just how much AI writing has actually taken over screenwriting, like the, the latest season of Wednesday apparently to so many people.

They’re like, wait a second. This was definitely written by ai, which I’m curious to see, you know, if that ends up coming out to be true.

Malcolm Collins: Maybe, I mean people have said that about the new Star Trek as well. And the thing is, is that, is that if you are like a standard woke progressive, you’re gonna sound like an ai, right? Like that’s the problem, right? That’s the problem.

Simone Collins: response to this is, does it matter? What’s

Malcolm Collins: Does it matter? Do you notice the difference? They’re already on autopilot.

I mean, and, and you see this as they get older and they get more entrenched in this. I mean, obviously the famous case here is Stephen Colbert where, you know, I was watching him on like strangers with candy recently and he was hilarious. And then you go to the Colbert Report or his

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: the Daily Show and he was hilarious.

And, and then just as time has gone on, he’s gotten less and less funny. And now he’s just basically chat GPT. Try to be a snarky progressive, talking about the news, right? How did he get that bad? How did he become [00:05:00] so deeply unfunny? And I,

Simone Collins: is his writers. It is not like he does all his own stuff.

Malcolm Collins: he did do his own stuff. Remember when there was the, the writers strike, Stephen Colbert was one of the shows that kept going, was out writers. So we know what Stephen Colbert was. He was quite funny. His quality didn’t really drop at all.

Simone Collins: He is bad writers now.

Malcolm Collins: the, the point I’m making is I think that he does a lot more of his own writing than other people do.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: that I didn’t notice a change in his show when he lost all the writers due to the writer’s strike. This was age ago, by the way. Talk about ancient history.

Simone Collins: I know.

Malcolm Collins: and I liked his show enough then that I was able to tell there wasn’t a big drop in quality during the writer’s strike. The other funny thing is the ridiculousness that like Wag has asked for, just if you wanna get an idea of like how insane Wags requests have been.

This is the, the Writer’s Actor’s Guild that has a union picketing it.

Simone Collins: Huh.

Malcolm Collins: They tried to make it so that you would have a, like when we’re talking about urban culture brained writers, right?[00:06:00]

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Tried to make it so that you had a, have a minimum number of writers per show. I think. Go over. It’s like four people, at least four to six people.

And it’s like, that’s how you get slop. Like too many cooks.

Simone Collins: too many cooks. Too many cooks.

Speaker 3: So sweet Dash ‘em. Cool to add the heat and you die. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many, too many, too many cook, too many cooks, too many cook.

Too many. Too many gonna fit in here. This is the worst case of intra I’ve ever seen. You can even hear [00:07:00] the theme music. And the thing is, we have no idea how contagious this strain is.

Speaker 5: Now look.

Speaker 3: Kids. Little love to make it nice and you Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Many.

Simone Collins: .

So bad. It’s so bad. I, I like, just, let’s just add more people. There’s the, the famous research that showed that after a certain group size, the IQ of, of the collective thought process goes down significantly. Like, let’s just make this worse. Jus...